The speaker icon in Chrome browser tabs is one of the amazingly helpful features that makes Chrome my default browser. But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to mute a tab without going into the actual page that’s making all of the noise? It turns out that the Chrome team is actually working on such functionality and it is available as a beta product by putting the following URL into Chrome:

chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting

Once there, you’ll see a line like this:

Simply click “enable” and restart Chrome. I’ve been playing with it for about 30 minutes and it seems to work well but isn’t 100% effective on Adobe’s Flash volume according to a thread on the matter. As someone who usually steers clear of Flash, it isn’t a big deal and it makes life a little better.